. . . [Avati] stood out from the majority of other illustrators of the time by insisting on actually reading every book before designing its cover.

As a result, he read some very good books. Among Avati’s thousand-plus illustrations are those for Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy.

Avati's approach—to capture the book’s overall theme, rather than a specific scene, by employing gritty, boldly realistic characters placed in a sharply detailed setting—immediately proved to have the desired effect: It sold books.